As TikTok’s ban in the United States looms, hundreds of thousands of young people are reportedly flocking to a Chinese social media platform that a Pentagon-designated “Chinese military company” owns a substantial stake in.
Xiaohongshu, known as “RedNote” or “RedBook” in English, is a Chinese-owned video-sharing and e-commerce platform that has been described as the Instagram of China. The app, which is seeing a surge of young so-called TikTok refugees, has received multiple large rounds of investment from the Chinese technology conglomerate Tencent. The U.S. Department of Defense designated Tencent on Jan. 7 as a “Chinese military company,” meaning it is “directly or indirectly owned, controlled, or beneficially owned by” the Chinese military or that it is a “military-civil fusion contributor to the Chinese defense industrial base.”
“If elected officials in Washington are concerned about ByteDance’s ownership of TikTok, they should also be concerned about Tencent’s stake in Xiaohongshu,” Michael Sobolik, American Foreign Policy Council senior fellow and author of Countering China’s Great Game, told the Washington Examiner. “Earlier this month, the Department of Defense added Tencent to its blacklist of PRC companies affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army. We cannot allow the Chinese Communist Party to effectively control the algorithms of America’s most popular social media apps.”
Tencent’s first reported investment in RedNote came in 2018 when it joined the Alibaba group in purchasing a $300 million stake in the fledgling social media platform, accounting for roughly 10% of its $3 billion valuation at the time. Three years later, Tencent doubled down on its bet by joining Alibaba again for a $500 million investing round in the platform.
Alibaba, like Tencent, maintains strong ties with the Chinese government. The Chinese e-commerce giant has made software for the CCP, is partially owned by the government, and reportedly developed and sold facial recognition technology calibrated to detect the faces of Uyghurs, an ethnic group the Chinese government is subjecting to human rights abuses.
Amid RedNote’s surging popularity in the West, Tencent is reportedly seeking to purchase an even greater stake in RedNote. While it is unclear what Tencent’s exact stake in RedNote is as of writing, recent media reports identify that Chinese tech company as a major investor.
Tencent’s ties to the Chinese government were well documented even before the Pentagon designated it as a Chinese military company.
Tencent CEO Ma Huateng, for instance, served two terms as part of China’s CCP-controlled National People’s Congress, and WeChat, a Tencent-owned messaging service popular in China, engages in censorship and surveillance on behalf of the CCP, per Human Rights Watch.
Lawmakers are apprehensive about another Chinese social media platform accruing influence in the United States.
“Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book was instrumental in China’s communist cultural revolution that led to the tragic deaths of tens of millions of Chinese citizens,” House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party Chairman John Moolenaar said in a statement provided to the Washington Examiner. “Today, a Chinese app of the same name wants to be the next TikTok – complete with Chinese control. Parents and social media creators should be aware that the CCP exploits PRC-based applications to surveil and censor Americans. The good news is that President Trump has the authority under the TikTok bill to force divestment of other CCP controlled applications that pose national security risks as well.”
While the law forcing TikTok’s departure from the United States does give Congress the authority to ban other apps controlled by foreign adversaries once they obtain more than 1 million monthly users, President-elect Donald Trump has previously taken stances against censoring Chinese social media, even going as far as to consider an executive order to block the ban of TikTok.
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Tencent is not the only thing linking RedNote to the CCP.
Huawei, which the Pentagon has labeled as a Chinese military company since 2020, also has a relationship with RedNote. The two companies signed a cooperation agreement in August 2023 enabling RedNote to better integrate itself with Huawei’s search engine and AI chatbot. Additionally, the two Chinese firms will work together to improve RedNote’s compatibility with Huawei’s HarmonyOS as well as the telecom giant’s broader mobile ecosystem.
Many Americans joining RedNote as new users have brushed up against CCP-imposed censorship on the app, with guides on how to avoid bans related to sensitive political topics growing in popularity. A 2022 report from the China Digital Times, a California-based nonprofit publication, analyzed leaked documents from RedNote and found that the website’s content moderators banned or limited posts critical of Chinese President Xi Jinping, negative statements about the CCP, and discussion of some sensitive news topics.
RedNote did not immediately respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.